Jeff Chang

After several years of unrest and tragedy across the United States, how can we heal and discover a path forward for social justice? What can we expect for race relations in a changing, polarized America? In this talk, Jeff Chang explores the thoughts and ideas that he put in his essay collection We Gon’ Be Alright, which The Washington Post called “the smartest book of the year.”

The key to healing is in stopping the growth of resegregation—there are groups that want to bring us back to the days before Brown-vs.-Board-of-Education, when people of color had to sit at the back of the bus and American schools were divided. We need to unseat and confront any policies that would lead us to resegregation, and join the great fight of our time—the fight to once again establish America as a thriving, prosperous, equitable place for all.

Asian-Americans are experiencing a surge in violence and discrimination; if we want to fight back against this tragic trend, Jeff Chang says that we need to know our history. Asian Americans first came to the U.S. to serve as inexpensive labor after the abolition of slavery. Since then, Jeff says that Asians have played an ‘in-between’ role in the racial hierarchy of the country. This in-between status—characterized by the model minority myth—can be harmful, dangerous, and obscure the inequality that Asians and Pacific Islanders face, even in their own communities.

In the light of anxieties and conspiracy theories about the coronavirus and the deaths of Asian women in Atlanta in the spring of 2021, we need deep historical context for this racially charged moment in history. We don’t want to emerge from this crisis more divided than before. And while change won’t happen overnight, this knowledge will empower us to move away from racial segregation, inequity, and injustice, toward a multicultural future.

Race is the most divisive and intense topic in American life, whether half a century go or today. Over the past few decades, the United States has seen the most dramatic demographic and cultural shifts in its history: what can be called the colorization of America. But the same nation that elected its first Black president on a wave of hope has still been plunged into endless culture wars. Jeff Chang asks the questions that we need to confront about how we got here and where we’re going next.

How do Americans see race now? How has that changed—and not changed—over the last fifty years? After eras framed by words like “multicultural” and “post-racial,” do we see each other more clearly than we used to? In this talk, comic strips and contemporary art mix with campus protests and corporate marketing campaigns, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Trayvon Martin to form a powerful, unusual, and timely cultural history of the idea of racial progress.

Beats. Rhymes. Life. Hip hop, as both music and a social movement, influenced a generation with new insights on politics, community, and art. Social historian Jeff Chang travels across the world and back through the decades to show us how hip hop defined the lives of millions of people and continues to impact us today.

From his award-winning book Can’t Stop Won’t Stop—Slate called it one of the best non-fiction books of the past 25 years—we trace the tumultuous period in which hip-hop came to life: a time when the post-civil rights generation moved from out of the margins and into the mainstream. These passionate stories are backed up by deep research and a critical understanding of pop culture, to show that this important history is actually their history.